A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Obama’s ‘I Welcome the Debate’ on NSA Spying Is the Real ‘Lie of the Year’

It’s not easy to pick the year’s most transparent lie from the self-styled “most transparent administration in history.” There are so many to choose from — such a richness of embarrassment.

For its “Lie of the Year,” PolitiFact went with President Obama’s “if you like your health plan, you can keep it”; the Washington Post Fact-Checker put the same statement at the top of its “biggest Pinocchios of 2013” list. It’s a choice that has a lot to recommend it, but Obama’s been singing that refrain since at least 2009.

For my money, the biggest presidential lie of the year came on June 7, the week after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s secret collection of call records data on millions of Americans. “I welcome this debate,” Obama proclaimed — even as his administration was hunting down the whistleblower who started it and preparing to hit him with 30 years of Espionage Act charges.

“Whether the president likes it or not, the debate is on.”

Of course, if the president actually wanted this debate, he didn’t need to wait for an NSA contractor to risk his freedom by kicking it off. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., had been warning for years about a “Secret Patriot Act”; Obama could have ended the secrecy himself at any time by publicly revealing that it interprets section 215 of that act broadly enough to authorize bulk collection of all Americans’ phone records (and likely much more).

Since June, just how little President Obama ”welcomes” this debate has been evident in his petulant, defensive demeanor when questioned — and the actions his administration has taken to squelch it.

At his final take-your-medicine press conference of 2013 on Friday, the president grudgingly took several questions on NSA spying. His answers, and evasions, left a lot to be desired. Still, after six months, he’s almost done welcoming the debate, and may be ready for it to start: “I’m going to make a pretty definitive statement about all of this in January.” Meanwhile, just after the press conference was over, Obama’s Justice Department once again invoked the “state secrets” privilege to shield NSA surveillance programs.

A week ago Monday, in federal district court in Washington, Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the metadata program was almost certainly unconstitutional. “Surely such a program infringes on that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” he wrote. The “author of our Constitution,” James Madison, “would be aghast.”

Judge Leon seemed rather aghast himself: his opinion features more exclamation marks than you typically see from a federal judge. On the government’s contradictory assertions that the program is “comprehensive” but plaintiffs can’t show their data was collected: “Candor of this type defies common sense and does not exactly inspire confidence!” On the “burdens” of removing plaintiffs’ information: “[T]he public has no interest in saving the government from the burdens of complying with the Constitution!”

Importantly, Judge Leon noted that there was “no indication” that metadata searches “were immediately useful or that they prevented an impending attack.” Though the administration claimed that the programs in question have prevented over 50 terrorist incidents, “no proof of that has been put before me” even though “the government could have requested permission to present additional, potentially classified evidence in camera.”

Two days after Judge Leon’s ruling, the president’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies released its report, which was similarly skeptical about the security benefits of dragnet data collection: “Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders.”